I am a bestselling author and a freelance journalist who concentrates on man’s struggle to keep the state in balance with the American dream. My latest book is The Future of the Gun. I am also the author of The Ultimate Man's Survival Guide. My website is www.frankminiter.com. I am a former senior editor at Outdoor Life and a former executive editor for American Hunter (an NRA magazine). I still write for the NRA's publications and I am a "field editor" for American Hunter. This is a purely gratuitous title, but one I'm proud of, as I am a life member of the NRA. I mention all this because Media Matters has been saying I'm secretly an "NRA employee" to attack my credibility on the gun issues. When they can't handle the facts they attack the messenger.

Goodbye Maryland, Beretta Says It's Opening a Factory In A Freer State

After 35 years in Accokeek, Maryland, Beretta announced it will open a factory in Gallatin, Tennessee. They are constructing a $45 million dollar state-of-the-art manufacturing and research and development facility in Tennessee’s Gallatin Industrial Park. Beretta had warned Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley (D) they would find it difficult to stay or expand in a state where their employees can’t buy the products they’re making for citizens, law enforcement and the U.S. military.

O’Malley pushed for and signed the Firearm Safety Act of 2013 anyway. O’Malley had said in a statement that the bill strikes “a balance between protecting the safety of law enforcement and our children, and respecting the traditions of hunters and law-abiding citizens to purchase handguns for self-protection.”

Senate Minority Leader E.J. Pipkin (R-Cecil) disagrees. He said, “The fact is the Firearm Safety Act of 2013 provides no safety. It says, if you own guns, we’re coming for you. That’s the message.”

The legislation bans the sale 45 types of semiautomatic rifles (what some in the media calls “assault weapons”), requires citizens who follow the law to be fingerprinted and more before they can purchase a handgun, limits magazine capacity to 10 rounds, requires gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to police and empowers state police to audit gun dealers.

Sheriff Mike Lewis of Wicomico County, Maryland, told me, “The law won’t do anything to stop criminals. All the law will do is infringe upon the constitutional rights of law-abiding residents of Maryland.”

While I toured Beretta’s Maryland plant in December 2012, just days before the horror in Newtown, Matteo Recanatini, web & social media manager for Beretta in the U.S., said to me, “Beretta is almost 500 years old and still strong because they invest in people. We have a skilled workforce here in this ‘blue’ state so we’re staying and investing in the future.”

That optimism was soon crushed under the weight of anti-gun politics.

Jeff Reh, Beretta USA’s general counsel and vice-general manager, spoke during public comment periods in Annapolis as the state legislature debated the gun-control laws. Reh warned lawmakers that Beretta could only take so much. He reminded them that the last time Maryland ratcheted up Second Amendment restrictions in the 1990s Beretta responded by moving its warehouse operation to Virginia.

“I think they thought we were bluffing” in the 1990s, Reh told the Washington Post. “But Berettas don’t bluff.”

After the gun-control legislation passed, Beretta officials visited 80 potential sites in seven states. Reh says 20 grading criteria were applied to those sites and that Gallatin, Tenn., came up the winner. The decision, however, wasn’t finalized until Ugo Beretta visited the site on December 30, 2013.

Reh said, “When Beretta chooses a location for its business, we start with the possibility that we will be in that location for decades, if not hundreds of years, to come. We move forward with confidence knowing that Tennessee is a great place to do business. We look forward to our opportunities here and we look forward to working side-by-side with our new Tennessee neighbors.”

During this fight against a law that targets those with legal guns, Reh said many times: “Why expand in a place where the people who built the gun couldn’t buy it?”

Other firearms companies have been forced to make the same decision. In December of 2012, for example, Magpul Industries had been preparing to break ground on a new facility in Colorado. Magpul’s PMAG magazines, AR stocks, grips and other products have been in high demand. Started in a home basement in 1999, by 2012 Magpul had grown passed 200 employees and the future looked bright. But then the state’s Democratic-led legislature and its governor, John Hickenlooper, decided the way to stop sociopaths from taking advantage of “gun-free zones” is to restrict law-abiding citizen’s freedom. The Colorado Senate’s President, John Morse, then stood on the Senate floor and argued that new gun restrictions were needed as a way of “cleansing a sickness from our souls.”

Magpul, and other companies, immediately responded to this emotionally charged anti-gun ideology by saying they’d take their jobs out of Colorado if the state banned the sale of some of its products. A lot of freedom-loving Coloradoans protested the proposed gun-control legislation and many pointed out that all the facts show the proposed Second Amendment infringements wouldn’t stop the bad guys with guns.

The legislature and governor went ahead and banned so-called “high-capacity” magazines (in this case those holding more than 15 rounds); required “universal background checks” that make it illegal for a grandfather to give his grandson his shotgun; forced gun buyers to pay for their own background checks; and so much more.

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